e castle Count
Victor rushed, still hearing the shouts in the wood behind, and as he
seemed, in spite of his burden, to be gaining ground upon his pursuers,
he was elate at the prospect of escape. In his gladness he threw a
taunting cry behind, a hunter's greenwood challenge.

And then he came upon the edge of the sea. The sea! _Peste!_ That he
should never have thought of that! There was the castle, truly,
beetling against the breakers, very cold, very arrogant upon its barren
promontory. He was not twenty paces from its walls, and yet it might as
well have been a league away, for he was cut off from it by a natural
moat of sea-water that swept about it in yeasty little waves. It rode
like a ship, oddly independent of aspect, self-contained, inviolable,
eternally apart, for ever by nature indifferent to the mainland, where a
Montaiglon was vulgarly quarrelling with _sans culottes_.

For a moment or two he stood bewildered. There was no drawbridge to this
eccentric moat; there was, on this side of the rock at least, not so
little as a boat; if Lamond ever held intercourse with the adjacent isle
of Scotland he must seemingly swim. Very well; the Count de Montaiglon,
guilty of many outrages against his ancestry to-day, must swim too
if that were called for. And it looked as if that were the only
alternative. Vainly he called and whistled; no answer came from the
castle, that he might have thought a deserted ruin if a column of smoke
did not rise from some of its chimneys.

It was his one stroke of good fortune that for some reason the pursuit
was no longer apparent. The dim woods behind seemed to have swallowed
up sight and sound of the broken men, who, at fault, were following up
their quarry to the castle of Mac-Cailen Mor instead of to that of Baron
Lamond. He had therefore time to prepare himself for his next step. He
sat on the shore and took off his elegant long boots, the quite charming
silk stockings so unlike travel in the wilds; then looked dubiously at
his limbs and at the castle. No! manifestly, an approach so frank was
not to be thought of, and he compromised by unbuttoning the foot of his
pantaloons and turning them over his knees. In any case, if one had to
swim over that yeasty and alarming barrier, his clothing must get wet.
_A porte basse, passant courbe_. He would wade as far as he could, and
if he must, swim the rest.

With the boots and the valise and the stockings and the skirts of
his coat tucke